Technology is ever changing and today is changing so rapidly that it can be hard to keep up. Back in the day, changes came at a slower rate like when we moved from standard typewriters to electric typewriters, or when we were first introduced to the microwave oven, cable TV and on screen video games. But it seems that once the world went digital, changes and advances to technology exploded.
Once we were only able to take pictures in black and white and then we had the ability to get them in color. It took a week or longer to receive the prints back. Photos were saved in photo albums to take out when family and friends were over, to share memories of vacations, holidays and babies. Photo albums take up space and often times people just didn’t have the time to place the photos in the album and write the little captions underneath. The result was envelopes of developed pictures that were put into a drawer, picked through and sometimes lost. With no albums there was no chronological age to the pictures to show the story of our lives.
Cameras were introduced that gave us instant pictures that we pulled out of the camera and let sit for a minute while it developed. The quality was not that great, but getting to see a picture that quick was a treat. Photo booths opened up in kiosks, parking lots and drug stores that could develop pictures the same day in as little as an hour. Another major milestone in picture taking and image capturing.
But it wasn’t until the advent of digital cameras that the world was able to take pictures and see them instantly on the little LCD screen in the back of the camera. Being able to re-take a bad shot, delete shots you didn’t like and take a lot more pictures than the typical 24 film role of the past, was a major event. Digital images were downloadable to your computer or could be sent to be developed in an hour at a print shop. Those with color printers could purchase special picture paper to print their own pictures at home. Everything became very easy. But we were still missing one major piece of the puzzle that would help us easily share out photos with everyone and anyone we wanted. Sure we had photo albums or envelopes of printed pictures but again space and losing pictures was still an issue.
Most people chose to email pictures to family and friends, but this was slow and a lot of times the images were too big and had to be broken down into several emails. Image hosting changed all that by allowing users to upload multiple photos as one time to a server for free and then share the link with as many people as they wanted. This latest piece of technology now makes it easy to take a picture, download it to your computer, upload it to an image hosting service and email the link to 100 people or more all within 5 minutes.
